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Perspectives on Epic PDF

189 Pages·1965·3.101 MB·English
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PERSPECTIVES O N EPIC edited by Frederick H. Candelaria AND William C. Strange Both, University of Oregon ALLYN AND BACON, INC. • BOSTON, 1965 ALLYN AND BACON CASEBOOK SERIES GENERAL EDITOR • LEONARD F. DEAN © Copyright 1965 by Allyn and Bacon, Inc. 150 Tremont Street, Boston. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by mimeograph, or any other means, without permission writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 65-18895 Printed in the United States of America PREFACE P erhaps no anthology like this one has been attempted before because the epic is indeed a vast subject and the approaches to it varied. But the appeal, too, is vast and varied. No other genre has the scope of epic, if we define epic and the epic spirit (as E. M. W. Tillyard does) to include certain novels and dramas such as War and Peace and Shakespeare’s history plays. Even more strictly defined, the epic is the genre of the heroic age, and so succeeds better than any other form in evoking (and perhaps provoking) the heroic spirit in our unheroic age. There is also the appeal of literary problems posed by the many changes epic has undergone. What is involved in the transformation of the oral (primary) epic into the literary (secondary) epic; of the heroic poem into the romance; of serious epics into mock epics; of the epic poem into the epic novel? Are works so diverse as The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, and The Wasteland; The Rape of the Lock, Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, The Prelude, and War and Peace; and Shakespeare’s histories—all epics? Why was the epic so highly regarded in the Renaissance, an age so rich in other literary forms? Usually, epics are thought of as long poems, but is (as Poe asked) a long poem really possible? Is epic possible today? The essays, chronologically arranged to correspond with the evolu­ tion of epic over the ages (historical and literary “periods”), and the exhibits, arranged to illustrate formal and other aspects of epic, are, respectively, secondary and primary materials that should be used with any of the several epics readily available in paperback books. The essays and exhibits will illuminate historical and critical questions that are raised in studying epics and other forms in introductory “types” courses, English literature survey courses, world literature panoramas, and advanced genre studies. The exhibits that comprise the second part of the book are primary materials especially useful for controlled research topics in teaching the research paper in freshman composition courses. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the help and encouragement we received in preparing this book from Professor Leonard F. Dean, our general editor, the editoral staff of Allyn and Bacon, and especially Marilyn Triplett for her secretarial assistance. Frederick Candelaria William C. Strange CONTENTS PART ONE: ESSAYS 1 Literature Without Letters-Rhys Carpenter 3 Homer-C. M. Bowra 10 Enter the Romantic Roman: Virgil-Edith Hamilton 23 Heroic Song: Siegried-Jan de Vries 32 The Dark Ages: Beowulf ■ Gilbert Highet 41 Dante-E. M. W. Ti llyard; Samuel Taylor Coleridge 51 The Romance Epic -Graham Hough 54 Renaissance Ideas-Joel E. Spingarn 62 Milton •Arnold Stein 73 Dryden- William K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Cleanth Brooks 84 Epic, Comedy, and Prose-Henry Fielding 87 Wordsworth: The Personal Epic-Karl Kroeber 93 The Possibility of a Long Poem-Herbert Lindenberger 103 Theory of Genres -Northrop Frye 114 Epical Actions-Paul Goodman 121 On Translating Homer Once More-Kenneth G. Wilson 130 The Orphic Voice-Elizabeth Sewell 140 PART TWO: EXHIBITS 143 I. The Conventions of Epic Definitions 1. M. H. Abrams 145 2. Lord Byron, from Don Juan 148 Simile 149 1. Homer, from The Iliad, as translated by Chapman 149 2. Virgil, from The Aeneid, as translated by Wordsworth 149 3. Virgil, from The Aeneid, as translated by Dryden 150 4. Milton, from Paradise Lost 151 vii Invocation 152 1. Homer, from The Odyssey, as translated by Pope 152 2. Milton, from Paradise Lost 152 3. Wordsworth, from The Prelude 153 Catalogue 154 1. Milton, from Paradise Regained 154 2. Wordsworth, from The Prelude 156 3. David Jones, “Redriff,” from The Anathemata 158 II. The Heroic Ideal 1. Homer, from The Odyssey, as translated by Rieu 162 2. Proclus, from Chrestomathy, as translated by Evelyn-White 163 3. Dante, from Hell, as translated by Cary 163 4. Tennyson, “Ulysses” 166 5. Ezra Pound, from The Cantos 168 6. Robert Graves, “Ulysses” 168 •III. A Difficult Age for Epic 1. Chaucer, from “The Squire’s Tale” 170 2. Malory, from “The Knight of the Cart” 171 3. Milton, from Paradise Lost 172 4. Wordsworth, “London, 1802” 173 5. Peacock, from “The Four Ages of Poetry” 174 6. David Jones, “Preface,” from The Anathemata 176 Readings and Topics Antiquity 181 The Middle Ages 181 The Renaissance 182 The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 182 Today 183 PART ONE ESSAYS LITERATURE W ITHOUT LETTERS* Rhys Carpenter The study of literature is an enterprise so vast that no one human mind can cope with it successfully. The multiplicity of languages, the centuries of time, are too formidable. Books and manuscripts, printed or written, recent, medieval, and ancient, make a total too great for a single lifetime’s reading. And yet this terrifying array, stretching from the pyramid texts of Egypt down to the novels of our own day, derives from only a fraction of the years and a portion of the lands in which human literary activity has flourished—if we will admit the etymological contradiction that literature may exist without letters. The craft of printing is only five hundred years old; European knowledge of paper dates back only a thousand years; the very art of writing has been known to most European peoples for less than two thousand years and nowhere, not even in China or Egypt or Mesopo­ tamia, seems to be appreciably older than five thousand. A respectable antiquity, this last one! But how much older still are poetry and song and the craft of telling enthralling stories to attentive ears? Without benefit of writing, songs may be composed, sung, remembered, and sung again; adventures may be told, incidents, anecdotes, and marvelous happenings recounted; even poetry of great range and power and beauty may come into being and persist, nor die with the passing of its maker. Beside and beyond the known realm of written literature stretches interminably the almost unknown world of oral literature, whose merest fraction has been reduced to written or printed form. Speech must be almost as old as humankind; song must be almost as old as speech; and poetry almost as old as song. Against this enor­ mous vista, writing, on which our literary types depend, is almost a modernism. It is idle to ask how old is language, since no one, seemingly, yet knows securely the age of sentient loquent man; wherefore it is impossible to venture even a .plausible guess at the antiquity of oral * Rhys Carpenter, Folk Tale, Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962], originally published as Vol. XX of the Sather Classical Lectures. Reprinted by per­ mission. 3 4 • PERSPECTIVES ON EPIC literary forms. Yet is is fairly safe to say that, with the antiquity of writing nowhere transcending five thousand years, the literature of unwritten speech must outdate its written competitor and successor by many times its measure. Attic tragedy and history, Plato and the pre-Socratics, will then become milestones set only a little distance back along the road which leads to the shadowy unwritten beginnings of literature. What seems a giant stride back into the past from Ibsen to Aeschylos is but a step that could be repeated many times before we should come to man’s primal discovery of the magic of assonances and cadences, when he began to use speech for something more than the mere grunted communication of his immediate want. But these other steps behind Aeschylos are steps into darkness where it is difficult to catch even a glimmer of a lost world. Yet we are not, like the paleontologists, seeking for things utterly extinct. Out of this immeasurable past, oral literature still survives today, both in its own right in its own true oral forms as well as in written record of itself, preserved before it died out in the past. But it has suffered and diminished greatly, and in many lands where once it flourished it is all but extinct today, because literacy, the spreading use of writing, everywhere sooner or later destroys it. Perhaps you remember the scene in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame where a cleric makes the rather cryptic remark that the printed book will ultimately destroy the carven edifice of the cathedral wherein architec­ ture and its attendant arts in the past had set the visual record of man’s thoughts. “The book will kill the building,” he insists; “this will kill that—ceci tuera cela!” So it has been with the impact of writing on oral literature: “ceci tuera cela!” And human memory, which once perforce kept all human records, relinquished its powers to the newcomer and grew proportion­ ately enfeebled with this cession of her strength. Most of us today can hardly credit the achievement of the illiterati who knew the Koran by heart or carried the entire Iliad and Odyssey in their minds. But nowa­ days whoever trusts his library and notebooks may no longer trust his remembrance. Only where memory cannot be displaced, as in the concert recitals of musicians or the operatic roles of singers, can we still observe its prodigious powers. But originally Mnemosyne was mother of all the Muses. In the world of today, where the spread of literacy has remorselessly been destroying the oral literary forms and only the lowest cultural levels preserve their preliterate traditions, oral literature has had to take refuge with the peasant and with backward cultures. But there the strata which have escaped schooling will continue to foster it, and in all levels the children still too young to have acquired letters will be its eager audience. But the mature, the intelligent, the gifted of mankind will despise and neglect it and let it die. For this reason it has been

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